This NYT article looks at Al-Jazeera International's coming launch in late May, and what the operation has to do to be successful.
HOW you see something," said Nigel Parsons, the managing director of Al Jazeera International, "depends very much on where you're sitting."
Those words could well serve as the manifesto for the channel, the English-language offspring of the polarizing pan-Arab network, which will make its debut in more than 40 million households in late May.
Addressing hundreds of journalists and academics who had come to Doha, Qatar, for the second Al Jazeera Forum, Mr. Parsons promised that the new channel — with its headquarters there and broadcast centers in Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur — will cover the stories and people that the Western-owned news media overlook. "We're not going to be another CNN, BBC or Sky," he told the attendees on the last day of January. "If we were, there'd be no point." But, he added, "It's not our position to tell viewers what to think."
During a freewheeling question-and-answer session, the audience pressed him for details. With costs already surpassing a billion dollars, Al Jazeera is the most ambitious television network start-up in recent years. Will it be the first network to crack the Western monopoly on delivering news and opinion to a global audience? Will it provide an Arab and Muslim point of view to the rest of the world?
Many at the forum hoped it would. But its top management is British, and its high-profile hires — like the smooth interviewer David Frost and the former "Nightline" correspondent Dave Marash — are hardly representative of the developing world. Will it then, the journalists wanted to know, just be colonialism in more modern garb?
Outside of that crowded conference room, the pressure is just as great. In the Arab world, Al Jazeera has a reputation for tackling the thorny issues. But in the United States, where it is best known for showing tapes of Osama Bin Laden's tirades, one person's fearless reporting can quickly become another's dangerous propaganda. And the more widely it is viewed as a terrorist mouthpiece, the harder a time the channel will have getting a spot on the already-crowded American cable line-ups.
Mr. Parsons understands the need to reassure new viewers in the West without disappointing old ones in the Arab world. "Essentially, it's about getting the balance right," he said.